


Save It (Like This)

by rusting_roses



Category: Leverage
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 23:11:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/313212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rusting_roses/pseuds/rusting_roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Alec and Eliot save Christmas for Parker</p>
            </blockquote>





	Save It (Like This)

They find out like this:

Alec is taking a nap on the couch, exhausted from staying up all night making sure the money transferred correctly on their last con, augmented by an all-night Star Trek movie marathon, while Sophie sews a button back on one of Parker's favorite shirts. Eliot is cooking dinner, attempting to prevent Parker from snatching vegetables from out of the wok and mostly failing until he starts threatening her with dismemberment-by-chopsticks and gets a pout in return. Nate is finishing up some last minute details on their latest con, attempting to ignore the noise around him and wondering how Alec's snores don't wake Eliot and Parker up when they sleep, because it sounds like he's blowing a fog horn, and Nate's pretty sure he'd suffocate the man with a pillow if he was forced to share his bed.

Sophie interrupts the squabbling of Eliot and Parker- _and God,_ Nate thinks _, they really are a married couple_ , and he laughs a little helplessly, because what else is he supposed to do?- by singing the first few lines of Angels We Have Heard on High along with the man on the radio in a clear alto. Eliot joins in a moment later, a light baritone that still surprises Nate, and the melody is as much apology as Eliot will ever give because he knows that Sophie, who doesn't like petty squabbles at the best of times, had made it clear that it was Christmas, so she expected them all to be happy. Alec had pointed out that being forced to be happy somewhat defeated the purpose, and then had ducked when the shoe came flying in his direction.

Alec's snores break up, and he snuffles loudly from the couch, and then gets up, blinking owlishly. A broad smile crosses his face as he sees everyone gathered in the small kitchen, Sophie and Eliot still singing along, Nate's face soft and pleased, Parker's eyes closed as she sways to the music. There might be a better way to wake up than this controlled chaos, but Alec can't think of one. He wanders into the kitchen and drops a kiss on Parker's mouth, and then waits until the song finishes and does the same to Eliot, because trying to kiss someone while they're speaking- or in this case, singing- is not as easy as all the movies make it look.

He gets himself a water, and asks if anyone else wants anything. Sophie asks for a glass of red wine. Parker and Nate want beers, while Eliot simply tells Alec that he wants a water too. When he's filled everyone's requests, the next song comes on, and Sophie starts singing again, voice melodic. This time, when Eliot joins in, so does Nate. Nate doesn't have the same purity as the other two, but he isn't half-bad, and has a certain reverence for the lyrics that Sophie and Eliot lack.

Parker glances at Alec, and then grins a little when she sees him start up singing too. Alec can't carry a tune in a bucket. He wouldn't be able to hold onto it even if she stole it for him. Though those voices all singing together should have been odd, should have been discordant, should have been faintly annoying, Parker just feels warm, like Eliot had just made her a cup of his special hot chocolate, or like Alec has just wrapped a scarf around her neck to protect her from the cold. She listens to the voices around her, and thinks, _This is Christmas, right_?

When the song finishes, they all burst out laughing, because they're relaxed and happy and it's the Christmas season and they're all together.

It's good.

As the next song starts up, Eliot's hip bumps against Parker's. He stops singing for a moment to say, "Come on! If Alec's doing it, when he can't sing for his life, you should too." Alec throws Eliot a look, but Eliot just gives him a grin that shows teeth. "You certainly can't do any worse than he is."

Eliot turns back to Parker, but Alec overrides whatever Eliot was going to say with a sing-songed, "You know you want to!" waggling his eyebrows meaningfully. He doesn't look insulted by Eliot's words, but Alec would be the first to admit that of his many skills, singing isn't one of them. Parker likes that they can tease each other like this, and still kiss a moment later. It's part of what makes them fit, with each other and with her.

Parker blinks a little in confusion, and then shrugs. "I would," she admits a little slowly, hesitantly, "but I never learned the lyrics."

~*~

They plan it like this:

They'd always intended to do a family dinner on Christmas Eve, and Parker's news doesn't change that. Except perhaps they're planning to make it a little more grandiose, a little more special, for all Parker dropped it on them two days short of Christmas. Still, they're masters of improvisation. They'll do it.

They can make anything happen, with a little bit of leverage.

For Eliot and Alec, that's all well and good, but they'd been planning to spend Christmas day together, just the three of them. They don't get a whole lot of free time, so they've been forced to take what they can to make sure their relationship works. They know how to make the most of a little bit of time, and they are adept at pulling things together even if it takes them right up to the wire.

So that night, when Parker is sprawled across the bed and taking up twice the mattress that a woman her size should, both Alec and Eliot creep out of bed. Their motions don't wake Parker up, and for that they are grateful; trust is a hard thing to come by with her.

They call Nate. He is more than willing to take Parker off their hands for a couple of hours- he tells them that he'll ask Sophie to call in the morning to have her help set up Nate's apartment for the dinner, since Alec had already been drafted by Eliot to go pick up the groceries. That way, Eliot and Alec will have time to set up their apartment and have it ready for Christmas morning. They'd put up a tree, of course, but that was it, so they wanted to make things nicer, prettier, better. They wanted Christmas to be worth something more than just a cold day in December to Parker.

When Eliot hangs up the phone, Alec complains more out of habit than anything else about picking up the groceries with Eliot. Eliot knows he'd rather be at Nate's, where he would make unhelpful comments about the decorations. He'd also probably spend a good portion of the time conspiring with Parker to get at the hoards of Christmas cookies that Eliot had stashed around Nate's apartment. Eliot learned the hard way during Thanksgiving that even being threatened with knives doesn't faze the two of them when they're in cahoots to gain access to sugar, and he doesn't want to spend more time baking, now when he's planning on making a full roast for their Christmas Eve dinner, complete with a whole host of side dishes that could feed twenty people.

It's a good thing the leftovers are just as delicious.

But that's not what Eliot is thinking about as he sets his cell phone down on the table. He and Alec are on the couch. Alec's curled up on with a notepad, scribbling down ideas. Eliot is on the other side, Alec's feet in his lap. He's absently running his fingers over the top as he suggests ideas, enjoying the sight of Alec writing. He'd been surprised when he'd first found out that Alec had the most elegantly perfect and beautiful handwriting that he never used. Alec had told him that his grandmother had always insisted that good penmanship was important, and had made him spend hours practicing it. It's one of those facts that Eliot likes to secret away and hide, the same way he does when Parker lets something slip about her past. Those are the things that let Eliot know that they trust him, that they love him, and though this wasn't where he expected to end up, he thinks this is a pretty good place to be anyways.

They make a whole list of things that they've simply got to do, and Eliot slowly starts seeing it less as something he wants to do _for_ Parker and more as something he wants to do _with_ her. Her and Alec. He finds himself thinking to his own childhood, back to that idealized Christmas, with gifts beneath the tree and paper snowflakes on the windows and enough blinking lights to give anyone who walked into the room a seizure. He thinks that maybe he should call his brother to wish him a Merry Christmas.

Alec smiles at him, over the pad of paper, teeth white against his dark skin, and Eliot shifts seamlessly, pushing Alec's feet off his lap and kissing him, long and slow and sweet simply because he can. "We should go back in soon," Alec murmurs against his skin, setting aside the pad of paper. "Parker won't be asleep too much longer if we're not there."

Eliot sighs, but allows himself to be pulled back to their bedroom. Parker is waiting for them, completely naked, one hand between her thighs, and Eliot and Alec have to support each other through their laughter when she says, "What took you so long?"

~*~

It goes to hell like this:

Parker seems happy enough to leave when she gets the call, or so Alec assumes. Parker likes it when Sophie wants her opinion, when Sophie gives her praise- and Sophie is honored, in turn, by the love showed by Parker and returns it in kind. Alec trusts that they'll have fun today, setting everything up, and is looking forward to dinner.

Setting up their apartment, however, isn't as easy.

Though they've got the Christmas tree up, and the wrapped gifts are underneath it, that's the only real thing they'd bothered to set out. The tree wasn't even really decorated; they'd only finished their last con a couple of days ago, and they'd all been exhausted. Sleep had seemed far more important than putting up wreaths or tinsel- after all, the decorations weren't nearly as important as the people that one spent the day with.

Now, however, it looks like a holiday store has exploded inside their flat. Eliot is frantically trying to figure out how to hang up a garland so it doesn't drop pine needles all over the floor because he knows he's going to have to be the one to clean it up, because getting Alec and Parker to do something as small as washing dishes is like herding cats. He's already hung up the mistletoe that Alec had insisted on, and had taped paper cutouts of snowflakes that he'd spent the morning doing- and Alec had spent the morning mocking- to the windows.

Alec is fiddling with the lights for the tree nearby, doing something with the wiring that Eliot _really_ thinks he should ask about, but he's decided it's better if he doesn't know. Plausible deniability and all that jazz. Alec frowns a few things, and curses under his breath with surprising vehemence and then stalks over to the wreaths they'd purchased, looking at the wiring for that. He stretches a little as he does so, his back popping loudly. They've both been at it for hours by now, and somehow their spacious apartment has turned into a cramped room filled with boxes and holiday themed pillows and an awful lot of greenery for someone who doesn't own a florists. There's even several pots of poinsettias sitting around, their flowers bright red.

Eliot's checking on the potatoes that are boiling in the kitchen- if he cooks them partway now, he can eke out a little extra time setting up the apartment, something which he suspects they'll need.

It's at that point that Alec says in a clear voice, "Um. Fuck."

There's the sound of frantic movement in the other room while Eliot clenches his eyes closed, hoping he's going to wake up from this holiday nightmare any minute, because when he'd been planning this last night, it had seemed like a good idea, but now all he can think is that he has no idea how his parents did it, because if there were two small children running around in this mess, they'd have surely ended up in the hospital. "What did you do, Alec?" Eliot knows he sounds like his mother, resigned.

The noises get more frantic. "Do you have a fire extinguisher?" Alec says in a high pitched voice.

"Do I have a _what?_ " Eliot yells, potatoes forgotten as he dashes back out into the main room. On the way, he careens into the box of ornaments they'd bought and runs through the pile, wincing only a little as the ornaments cut through his socks and feet. He's had worse.

Alec is attempting to beat out a fire with his sweater, the plastic around the wires melting and sending a horrific haze through the room.

Eliot has no words.

He runs for the fire extinguisher, running around the ornaments this time, and grabs it from under the sink in the kitchen, knocking the potatoes all over the floor in the process. He yelps as the boiling water hits skin, but, hello, fire. He runs into the main room for the second time and quickly but efficiently turns on the extinguisher and sprays everything that looks like it's on fire until a good portion of the floor and Alec is covered in white.

Alec takes stock of the room. Smoke, thick and pungent is in the air, and he momentarily thanks every heaven above that somehow the fire alarm hasn't been set off. Then he remembers he turned it off himself after the smoke from Parker's last attempt to cook had set it off, and he'd never turned it back on. The room reeks of melted plastic, and the lights are in no way salvageable. Frankly, Alec isn't sure how they managed to light themselves up in the first place, because he'd just been checking to make sure the lights were working. If he can rewire a computer, he doesn't see why when he rewired the lights things went up in smoke in an all too literal sense. He's freezing, from the...well, from whatever it was in the fire extinguisher, and his clothing is definitely ruined.

Eliot glances around too; the tree is just a little singed at the edges, and the presents are fine, and he sends his thanks up to whomever is listening. The broken ornaments are scattered across the floor, but he finds that when he checks his foot that they didn't inflict anything that can't be dealt with by a little bit of Neosporin and a band aid. A wreath that was near the lights is little more than a charred mass covered in white foam, and the garland he'd hung up had left streaks of soot on the wall from being burned.

It is a complete disaster.

Which is why, of course, that's the moment Parker chooses to walk in, look around in complete shock, and say, "Do I even want to know?"

~*~

They save it like this:

They call Sophie and Nate. They sort of have to, at this point, because they really can't leave the melted plastic on the floor and the smoke in the air. It might be near impossible to get it off the carpet at this point, but if they wait until tomorrow, they'll have to take up the carpet. To be fair, they're considering it as a real possibility at this point, because none of them really want to tackle it.

Nate and Sophie take it in stride, and they reschedule for the next day. Parker silently helps them clean everything up. She doesn't ask for an explanation; then again, it's pretty obvious what was going on.

It's late in the evening before they finally manage to get the apartment into something approaching livable, but even then the wall's probably going to have to be repaired, and the carpeting will have to come up. Even cleaning up the kitchen isn't too bad, in comparison to scrubbing foam out of the floor.

They order in from a Chinese place that delivers because they're exhausted. Eliot does muster up enough energy to make hot chocolate, however, the good kind from scratch, and they all lounge around in the chairs, freshly showered and watching the original version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas with only half their attention.

Parker is lounging on top of Alec, Eliot at their feet, his back against the couch. Eliot feels guilty as he says, "I'm sorry."

Alec shifts uncomfortably for a moment, before his hand comes up, large and warm and resting on the center of her back. "Me too," he murmurs into her ear.

Parker shakes her head a little, hair falling into Alec's face. He brushes it away absently. "It was good," she says drowsily, eyes more than half-shut. "And besides, tomorrow is Christmas."

"But Parker..." Alec trails off. He isn't sure what he's supposed to say. Pity disguised as sorrow has no place here, and condolences, however true, aren't going to change over twenty years of neglect. He can't talk of hope either. Eliot's hand comes up, intertwining with his own, and Alec clutches at it as a lifeline.

"This wasn't exactly how things were supposed to turn out," Eliot grumbles, and somehow that eases everything, and both Alec and Parker laugh lightly. "Chinese food and cleaning isn't exactly the best way I've ever spent Christmas Eve," Eliot continues a little ruefully.

"I've had worse," Parker admits, "and better." She huffs a little breath. "I like that you tried. I don't...you..." she fumbles with the words, and Alec's hand on her back starts rubbing soothing circles. "It doesn't matter. We'll have the decorations and the food and the way Christmas is supposed to go tomorrow. And it will be good, and we'll have fun, because we're together, and we'll be with Sophie and Nate. Besides," she grins a little, still tired, but her eyes are sparkling. "This is a real Christmas. In the books, in the movies- it's so..." her eyes flash as she remembers a word Sophie once used, "contrived. This is better. Because stuff happens, and some of it is fine, and some of it is not fine. It was not fine earlier, but it's fine now, right?" The words are hopeful, a little cautious. "Because we still have Christmas, but we're together now. Isn't that's what's supposed to matter?"

"It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes, or bags!" Alec quotes into Parker's ear, breath brushing against her face. She smiles a little, snuggling closer to Alec while Eliot tilts his head back, hair brushing the few centimeters of skin that are revealed between Parker's sweater and jeans.

"'Maybe Christmas,' he thought, 'doesn't come from a store'." Eliot continued, staring up at the ceiling as one of Parkers hands entwined with Eliot's free hand. Alec's fingers clenched a little tighter.

Parker yawned; they all did, really, and sighed, the heat from the three bodies soaking into one another, making them very comfortable indeed. Parker's voice was so quiet that neither Alec nor Eliot was entirely sure they heard it.

"Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more.”


End file.
